Peach Springs School, the Hualapai community's elementary school, became a national model for teaching a Native language after 1975, when the Hualapai educator Lucille Watahomigie founded its bilingual and bicultural program in response to community demand. That year about 95 percent of the school's students spoke Hualapai. Watahomigie, born in 1945 at Valentine, about twenty miles west on Route 66, had taught at the school after graduating from Northern Arizona University. The program built its own materials: Watahomigie helped develop a practical writing system for Hualapai and co-wrote the Hualapai Reference Grammar, the first full grammar of the language. A Dictionary of the Hualapai Language followed in 2003.
The work answered a long history of schools that suppressed the language. At the federal boarding school at Valentine, which ran from 1903 to 1937, teaching was in English, as at other federal Indian schools of the era. Watahomigie later said the attitude of the outsiders who ran Hualapai schools had been that they came to save the heathen.
Peach Springs trained other schools that wanted to copy its model, and taught with locally made materials, including early computer lessons with recorded Hualapai speech. Watahomigie also helped found the institute that became the American Indian Language Development Institute, which began in 1978, has been based at the University of Arizona since 1990, and trains Indigenous language teachers from across the country.
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35.5352, -113.4240
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